It's traditional to buy naughty toys and things with Lush competition proceeds. I may do so (still browsing, hehe).

In the meantime, I used some of it to make a small donation to the Rainforest Trust for their latest campaign to buy a chunk of Indonesian forest that's under threat from poachers and developers. Any donation is currently matched 4x by a generous donor. Not sure how long that offer lasts, so if anybody wants to help make an impact on this beautiful planet to protect the habitat of endangered tigers, elephants and orangutans, not to mention the forest's huge carbon store, now's the time to chip in.

Thanks once more to Nicola for running these competitions that push and stretch authors to make this the best erotica writing site on the web. And congrats once more to everyone who entered and made it a memorable event with so many ace stories. You're all marvellous.

Absolutely well deserved. These stories are an evocative assault on the senses via Frank's incredible penmanship. If I ever get to be half as good as this at writing, I'll be ecstatic.

If you haven't read these two, do so now.

Quote by KimmiBeGood
And WW, I'm finding it quite pleasurable to be underneath you

Always happy to be the filling in an all-girl sandwich

waggles eyebrows

follows some polar bear in and shakes off the snow

Arctic out there. Need me something warming. Any suggestions from the bar or elsewhere?

And congratulations again to all comp entrants. What a storming contest.

stunned silence

Wow. What a line up. I read virtually every story in the comp and I had a top, what, maybe 25 or more that could easily have taken the top spot.

Some absolutely amazing stories in the competition, from horror (Doll Parts was superb) to romance (The Blitz and My Balladier was sublime) and everything in between. So many A-games in the top ten and beyond, and I'm honoured to be among such company.

Congratulations to Tam and Kimmi of course for their podium slots, and the remainder of the top 10. I wish we could have half steps in between to shoe horn all the greatness in.

Thank you to the shortlisting/judging panel for their sterling job of ranking the stories. And of course to Nicola and the developers at the helm of the good ship Lush 2.0 that goes from strength to strength week by week as we adjust and find hidden galleys and new ways to hang out.

Hats off to everyone. Drinks are on Tam!

Ooooh Dan Brown. Can I can I?

https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/77702565.html

If it's automation you're after, gimme a shout. I have a few tools available to take content, brand it and format it for ebooks.

If the dev team here have an API I can hook into, even better for getting hold of content and reformatting it. If not, worst case approach is to scrape it and pull out the required bits.

If the page metadata is set up with decent social graph tags, some of the content can be dragged out that way. Incidentally, this would be an excellent plus-point for having the portrait cover image format available, since it'll import directly into other systems. But if the intention is to make new covers or only make a single cover for an anthology, then it's of no consequence.

Either way, drop me a line with your thoughts on what you want to achieve here and I can dust off my thinking cap to see if there's a way to grab what you you need and format it as pain-free as possible.

Quote by deviantsusie
it’s just a manual pain in the ass between paragraphs every submission

Search and replace in Google Docs sucks ass. I just tried it. You can't replace special characters but you can search for them.

Select the 'search by regex' checkbox in the find/replace dialog and search for \n\n. In an ideal world you would be able to replace with a single \n to remove double para marks, but no. That'd be too useful and Google don't want to help people, it seems.

Kimmi, your findings would be helpful here, thanks in advance for your report. I would like to think it'll behave similarly to Word but, well, this is the wild wild web, so anything's possible.

Thanks, dlcalguy. That's a nice visual indicator reference. So the enter key on its own is a paragraph break. Some modifier+enter is a line break. But multiple paragraph whitespace is gobbled up, while multiple line break whitespace is preserved. Handy to know.

Ah maybe it squashes extra line breaks now then. That's grand if it does, thanks for the report.

No change here as far as I'm aware. If you leave an entire blank line between each paragraph, you'll get an empty '<p></p>' pair between each paragraph here. So best bet is to globally replace ^p^p with ^p before copy and pasting to Lush, then undo the global replace to restore it looking better in your source document.

I think you can do that in Google docs but I'm not sure as I tend to work in Word.

James, it's not "too hard". It's a 2-line CSS tweak. I've done it. I submitted it as a patch suggestion months ago.

Having the cover art full/any aspect ratio on the story page is fine and fits the design space easily. Having it show up on the landing pages (front-page and category pages, which they don't do at the moment but probably will one day) will be made more tricky by not having a fixed aspect. Not impossible, just tricky.

The limitations of the grid that makes things look pretty and consistent on these pages will be compromised OR we will have to have cover art truncated/cropped to fit the container OR it will be scaled to fit, leaving ugly whitespace or borders (like we have now in the story pages). None are ideal.

There are creative solutions...

1: don't show cover art on landing pages at all in future, freeing them to be any aspect on story pages.

2: permit multiple images to be uploaded. One for the story page and, if you don't like the crop/resize it makes, supply a 2nd image specifically for the list pages. More storage space. More work for authors. But the best of both worlds.

3: adaptive resizing (which is computationally expensive but can be cached, at the expense of storage).

There are other avenues, I'm sure. But to deny that the issue of aspect ratio is not something that plagues web design, and is only an excuse, is short sighted.

A decision was made when the layouts were hastily put together prior to migration. Probably too few templates, truth be told, but time was at a premium. That has ramifications that will need unpicking over time.

Quote by JamesLlewellyn
1) When are we going to get PMs about stories by authors we're following?

When we get an option in the Settings>Email tab to enable it, I guess. Something akin to the timeline is also planned so at the very least you'll be able to see what your friends are up to and filter by type of event (new story, new comment, etc). That will relegate the need for an email option as a nice-to-have fallback rather than what is (currently) a necessity because bell notifications are... how can I put this... unreliable.

2) When can we PM our followers or friends as a group?

Spam is the devil's work ;)

Seriously, when it does resurface this feature needs to be introduced in tandem with a privacy option to opt-out of such messages because it's seriously fucking annoying. Come the re-revolution, to get a bell notification that someone's written a new story, and get an email, and see it on your timeline/activity feed and then get an email begging for reads/votes is massive overkill. Before I opted out of them in Lush 1, I've actually been ready to sit down and read a story, until I received a spam message. I binned the story and didn't bother reading it at all.

3) When are we going to be able to go back to full-sized images for cover art.

When someone can convince the designers that it's desirable, and images of any aspect ratio can live harmoniously in a responsive, grid-based design. I've tried.

Quote by Ensorceled
You just can't hint at it in the cover image

Ah, right. I didn't read your post properly, sorry. I see you were talking about cover art now. I'll get back in my box.

Quote by Ensorceled
which to them means any collars or restraints even hinted at

Drat, that torpedoes any chances of my comp entry making it in. It uses the words 'collar' and 'leash' once each.

My wife reads/skims all sorts of self-published crap in the free section on the Kindle store. Most of it's appallingly badly written, cliché nonsense. Billionaires, werewolves, witches, sometimes all three in one story. Hardly any of it seems to shy away from adult content, including explicit sex scenes. The level of proofreading is also laughable. Littered with errors - grammatical, spelling and syntactic - the funniest of which I read was a lass climbing onto her partner's 10' cock. Presumably with a stepladder.

I can only assume Amazon rely on people flagging stories that break their ToS, as there's no way they can proofread the volume of content that's published daily, and algorithms ain't that good.

Quite who would complain about someone's erotic novel to Amazon is unclear.

Ugh, spammers. You'd think they'd have something better to do.

I've been hit with these a few times this week. It is annoying but not much can be done.

If you spot a profile that's obviously for nothing but spam purposes, please report it via the helpdesk. Thanks.

The issue has been fixed, yay. Paginated tag searches work as they should. Big thanks to the developers for the prompt catch, and @TJP for raising it.

Grammarly and any grammar checker won't pick up tense or POV switches unless they're in the same sentence. As far as it knows, you might be telling one part of the story in present and then flashing back, or telling the same event from two people's perspectives.

A really good way to detect these is to read the story out loud (or have the computer read it to you - there's free software out there to do it, and some operating systems have it baked in). Listening to the story not only highlights mistakes, it also helps to show where pauses should be or missing/incorrect punctuation.

I think they kinda got forgotten in the excitement of the move; the data is still there, it's just the Series Award isn't coded over here. Yet. It's been mentioned to the development team. Not sure where it is on the roadmap.

As for the missing RRs, that is strange. I'd expect them to show up. Could you please raise a helpdesk ticket with links to the story chapters you believe had them so someone can check the records and see if there's something preventing them being displayed. Thanks.

As far as I can tell, you can't (yet) see your comments all in one place - only replies you've made to comments on your own stories. But you can see:

a) Your statuses (I think) from your avatar->Profile->Statuses.

b) Your favourite stories (avatar->Liked Stories).

b) Your forum posts if you visit the forum and click the 'My Posts' button at the top.

Hopefully at some point we'll have something a bit like the Timeline, and/or the Activity feed will be expanded and filterable so we can see what our friends and people we follow are up to.

Maybe there might be scope for listing all the stuff we've done on other stories too. The Liked Stories area could show stories we've commented on, liked, and any scores we cast, filterable by comments, likes or votes. That'd be neat.

@TJP. It's a bug. I've reported it.

For the time being you can manually hack it by visiting the URL after you've clicked on the Next button. Where it says (for example) 'tags=babysitter' change it to 'tag=babysitter' and hit enter. It'll refilter the list with the correct tag and show page 2. Unfortunately you'll need to do this on each page you click Next to see. Hopefully that's an easy one for the developers to fix.

"Eternals" yesterday (and wished I hadn't bothered).

"Last Night In Soho" today which more than made up for it. Fuck me, Edgar Wright can crank up the psychological tension like a master. Wow.

There is a tool to do so (at least mods can see them, not sure about authors yet) but it really is quite unusable.

I believe a better replacement is on the (long!) list of things to do.

The first competition after the migration of the site to a new home is hotting up. So I thought I'd add my work too.

Taking the tried and tested powerful Billionaire trope and giving it a coat of checkered paint when he meets with a sexy reporter was the aim.

I tried to crank up the seduction to 11 in the process. Did I succeed? Please let me know after reading The Five-Year Silence.

Thank you.

Useful info, thanks. Being kicked off is usually a sign that your login cookie has been invalidated somehow. Not sure under what circumstances that might occur here.

But yes, going back to a previous cached copy of a page could indeed trigger odd behaviour, depending on the reason for getting kicked off in the first place. Going back resubmits old headers to the server, and the session might become out of sync with whatever hashes have been negotiated (guesswork on my part: I have no idea what info is exchanged as I've not analysed it).

This is all useful feedback though as it can highlight odd system behaviour that manifests itself in a lumpy experience. Thank you.

Not sure I understand what the issue is. The print stylesheet is set for a middle-of-the-road, comfortable reading size. It might be a tad large (I've not tried it), but if it's made too small, people will complain they can't see it.

The beauty of an operating system or browser-supported print option - either to paper or PDF - is that you can choose the scaling. If you don't like how big the font is, in the print dialog, change the scale from 'fit to paper' to manually set the scale. Choose, I dunno, 60%. The characters per line will reflow automatically and a 6000-word story that previously occupied 21 pages now fits on 10; that's 5 sheets duplex. Depending on your eyesight that might be too small so YMMV, but it really is up to you.

All the Print button did on Lush 1 was fire up the browser's print dialog box and pass it a stylesheet with a small font size. It's no different here, it's just that the font size is a tad larger by default. Yeah, the print button is missing, but all you have to do is choose File->Print (or Ctrl-Shift-P / CMD-P) from the browser instead.

What am I missing?

No problem. Sometimes an aggressive cache either on the server side, CDN, or the browser can result in things getting 'stuck'. The conversation usually goes:

Browser: "Can I have the page please?"

Server: "I've given you that already, mate."

Browser: "Are you sure nothing's changed since last time I asked?"

Server (checking in its filing cabinet): "Yeah, positive."

Browser (opening its saddle bag and taking out the copy last sent): "Alright, thanks. Bye."

Sometimes, force refreshing can break that cycle and basically tells the server to shut up lying, and damn well deliver the content whether it's changed or not.

This sort of thing happens most often when there's been an update applied because the datestamps can get out of sync between server and browser. An annoyance, but without a cache, the internet would be a shitload slower than it is already, as there'd be much more unnecessary content being exchanged.

I can see it in your Unpublished list too.

There was an update made to the site today which affords moderators the ability to see unpublished works. I wonder if this has had a knock-on effect somehow and made it invisible to you? Very weird. Can you please perform some diagnostics:

1) Can you see the other five pieces in your Unpublished list?

2) If you force refresh (Shift-F5, CMD-R, etc) the Unpublished page, does it change anything?

3) Can you edit any of the unpublished pieces and commit the changes (even just a word or add a space/bit of punctuation and see if it sticks)?

4) If you follow the direct link supplied by the moderator to the missing piece of work, what options do you have for editing? Does it look any different to the interface for the other unpublished pieces? Can you edit it at all? Is the edit button missing? When modding pieces, sometimes I click through and the edit button sub-panel isn't there but a hard refresh makes it reappear. Does that happen with yours?

Basically I'm trying to figure out if there's anything different about this piece that might be triggering some weird behaviour. We've had odd things where someone who's blocked a user twice prevents their profile loading. We've had people who have set their privacy settings to 'no contact from men' have been unable to access certain content. And so forth.

Anything you can spot that might set this missing piece apart from the others would be most helpful to diagnose what's going on.

Quote by kistinspencil
with the Comment Page entries gone, I will have to go through each story and make a list.

Oooft, that's annoying. I didnt expect that, but thinking about it with my System Architecture hat on, it makes sense. The link between the list on the Comments page and the actual comment must get severed when the account is deleted because it's keyed via the account.

The link is good (in most ways) because it cuts down on duplication and means that if anyone edits a comment, both parties see the edits immediately, instead of seeing a stale copy/notification (like we had on Lush 1, which was annoying). Data here is stored in one place and everything else links to it.

But when the link is removed (an account is deleted) it leaves "orphan" content on stories and no way for us mortals to find them from the interface. That's something the spam combatting tools will need to take into account when they're made available.